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92 a poor excuse for not having attended to your duty: "I looked carefully after everything else, but lately I haven't given a thought to that"?

You hear a bit of gossip, you repeat it to your best friend. It goes around the circle and eventually you are forced to face it again. Then the woman about whom it was asks you why, and it seems a mean, low reason when you say: "Well, it was told to me and I never gave a thought to there being any harm in repeating it." So you see what may be wrought by thoughtlessness. The shrug of the shoulder, the curl of the lip when someone else is referred to may, on your part, mean very little, but when they are described and much stress laid upon them, the impression is that you know a great deal that you haven't told. What you did was done from thoughtlessness; that is your excuse. But this is absolutely true, one can easier battle with something that is premeditated than with something that is done in so-called thoughtlessness.

These are very mean sins. They make you undervalue your friends. They make you say petty, mean things, and they cause to grow in your heart a poisonous green plant which is bitter to the taste and which is called envy. You are